Reflective Response

I'm not writing an essay along with you, but I have still been thinking a lot about identity, perception, and the gaze of others. I've been working on this poem this quarter - it's not finished I don't think, but here it is so far. It's a sort of response both to our themes this quarter and especially to Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking.


Vertigo

I see myself

Standing in new shoes in the church

Wondering at the questions
Do I take you
Do you take me

Later, laughing at how awkward it seemed
To share a bed
All elbows and knees

Your eye met my eye
You said to me,
So this is you.


I see myself

Standing barefoot at a cradle

Wondering at this small, soft thing
This of me
This of you

Later, smiling at how sweet it was
To feel this body between us
A warm center

Your eye met my eye
You said to me,
And this is you.


I see myself

Standing in old shoes in summer baked, crumbling earth

Looking out over the stretch of garden established
By me
By you

And laughing at this year’s bumper corn
Finally, so high
So green

Later, feeling the calloused coarseness
Of your hand as it fit so neatly
Into mine

Your eye met my eye
And the bright sun,
For a glancing instant
Reflected my eye
In yours


I see myself with you

Standing at the end of our long drive

Stopping for breath together
As we looked out towards the darkening mountain

Later, walking slowly, the sturdiness of your arm
A warm familiar
Under mine

Dear eye met my eye
And the old sun,
In its last glowing,
Caught and held my eye
In yours


But now

A dark eye cannot meet my eye
Cannot see,
Cannot say,
Cannot mirror to me,
“you.”

And I forget how to be
How to see
Without your gaze
On me

I am
cold
and falling

I am not

me

Harvest of Words

"Harvest" is such a rich word, isn't it? One though that I think has lost much of its richness in our 21st century world. When I was growing up, my mother always had a vegetable garden. I remember those lazy days in the summer, grazing in the garden - picking a handful of peas and sitting on the grass to pop them open and eat them or tugging up the biggest looking carrot and washing it with the garden hose - or maybe just wiping it off on the grass - and munching away.

I suppose we had a kind of a harvest at the end of the year - digging potatoes, picking squash. It wasn't really a true harvest though - the garden was wonderful, but a kind of a luxury, not really a necessity, not the kind of thing we all toiled as a family over from spring through summer. Not the kind of thing we labored to gather in and store for the winter. We're not really used to that kind of seasonal labor, the kind of seasonal labor that's necessary to produce the food we need to survive. I'm not sure that I wish for that kind of hard life again, but I do regret that certain kinds of language lose a certain resonance and joy when they become merely abstract, merely things tied to the past. I suppose that's partly what I love about literature - language is kept alive, language comes alive, makes us remember, remember even the things we've never experienced.

I've been listening to the poet Seamus Heaney read Beowulf this week in bits and pieces (my way of protesting the movie) - and the language is amazing. It's a poem that ought to be listened to, not read and struggled over - most poems ought to be listened to, I suppose. My sisters-in-law have a tradition of inviting several couples over for a Harvest Dinner each autumn - they serve a meal and ask everyone to bring a reading or a poem. We're not quite used to reading poems aloud, are we? It felt a little awkward, but I wish we were a culture that could reacquaint itself with that habit. To hear each other's voices, to savor our language, its sounds, its meanings. It's a way of connecting with one another, connecting with our past, with our present. I love words.

Here is a poem for you:

And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,

That appeared once, still wet

As shining chesnuts under a tree in autumn,

And, touched, coddled, began to live

In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,

Tribes on the march, planets in motion.

"We are," they said, even as their pages

Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame

Licked away their letters. So much more durable

Than we are, whose frail warmth

Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.

I imagine the earth when I am no more:

Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,

Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.

Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,

Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

--Czeslaw Milosz

A Dream and a Terror

Have any of you seen trailers for the new movie Beowulf? In theory, I like the idea of taking great literature and translating it into film. The problem, though, is that I'm almost always disappointed and then I get depressed. I've not seen Beowulf, but I've just watched the trailer - and I find it distinctly disturbing on two levels. First, Beowulf is a classic piece of English literature, the oldest full piece that we have - its language is beautiful, rich, layered, mythic, heroic - it evokes another world, another time. The movie, however, looks like a video game at worst and at best, like the recent poorly-reviewed movie 300. It looks to have very little carry over from the richness of the original text. "Buff man meets monster, kills monster, buff man meets second monster and dragon, fighting ensues. The end." Let's just pull the heart out of the piece and stomp on it, shall we?

So after taking a lovely thing and making it cheap, it gets worse. Featured quite prominently in the trailer and in movie posters is the lovely Angelina Jolie, and I find Adrienne Rich's "When We Dead Awaken" may have a great deal more carry over than I thought. Her complaint, you remember, is that in literature male writers only ever portray women as a dream or a terror, an angel or a monster, a redemption or a threat. And in the end of her piece, Rich also refers to the grindhouse movies of the 70's. One would think we've moved beyond those days, that literature, those films, but I don't know if we've moved at all beyond those exploitative grindhouse movie days when sexy women were victims who became terrors who then took particular pleasure in killing men. Jolie plays Grendel the monster's mother - and guess what? She gorgeous, sexy, semi-naked, and she seduces men into her lair, so she can kill them. They didn't make Grendel's mother a monster, they made her a beautiful woman. No wonder Rich was angry.

Here's the beginning of one of her poems:

A woman in the shape of a monster

a monster in the shape of a woman

the skies are full of them

Are our theaters full of them, do you think?

Through the Lens of Our Selves

I've just finished watching Grizzly Man again in preparation for our viewing it in class on Tuesday. This is the third time I've seen it, and I think the experience of it only gets more extraordinary. The film is about Timothy Treadwell, but I love how present the filmmaker Werner Herzog makes himself in the film. In most documentaries, the filmmaker tries to remain hidden, tries to keep his or her own opinions out of sight - doing so, I suppose, in the interest of objectivity or at least, in the interest of seeming to be objective. But Herzog openly tells us what he thinks. He is the narrator - we hear his voice - we know it is he who is, in some sense, fashioning and shaping our vision of this grizzly man. He tells us that Treadwell had a "sentimentalized view that everything out there was good and the universe was in balance and in harmony,” and then he says of himself, "But I believe the common denominator of the universe is chaos, hostility, and murder." In the end of the film, too, he says that he believes the footage Treadwell took “is not so much a look at wild nature as it is an insight into ourselves, our nature . . . and that, for me, beyond his mission, gives meaning to his life and to his death.” He tells us how he personally interprets Treadwell's life and death. His use of "I" and "me" is refreshing because we can try to be objective, we can pretend to be objective, but, surely, we can never be truly objective. Our subjectivity always intrudes. We always gaze at the world, at others, through the lens of our beliefs, our individual quirks, our likes and dislikes, our education, our family history, our selves. That is not to say I think everything is relative, that nothing can be known for certain, but I do believe we must acknowledge our own subjectivity and recognize it in others to begin to see with clearer vision.